As a teenager he could bend steel bars in his bare hands, as well as with his teeth. At 39, after he had taken up bodybuilding, he won the Mr. Universe competition. And he managed all this despite being only 4 feet 11 inches, thus the nickname.

Manohar Aich died last Sunday in India at 103, remembered not only for his almost superhuman strength but also for a colorful life. As an airman in the colonial Royal Air Force, he was court-martialed for insubordination and imprisoned. He performed for more than a decade in a traveling circus, where he flexed muscles in time to music. And he ran a gym on the ground floor of the three-story building in which he lived, grooming some of India’s greatest bodybuilders.

Beyond all that, he was revered for leading a profoundly simple life, both physically and philosophically. He never drank or smoked, and he kept to a diet of rice, fish, vegetables, lentils, fruit and milk. Dismissive of high-tech exercise machines, he trained himself and others through thousands of repetitions of Indian-style push-ups and squats, known as dand and bethak.

His refrain, “as it is,” summed up his life philosophy, said Bishnu Aich, 68, the eldest of Mr. Aich’s four children, three of whom survive him.

“He never allowed himself to worry about anything,” Bishnu Aich, who helped Mr. Aich run his gym, said in a telephone interview. “He took everything as it was, as it came. That was the secret to his success and his happiness and his long, long life.”

Manohar Aich was born on March 17, 1913, in the village of Putia in Comilla District, which was then part of British India and is now in Bangladesh. After overcoming a severe illness as a child, he devoted himself to healthy living and strength training, inspired by watching local wrestlers exercise. He copied their push-up and squat regimens in what became a lifelong conviction that simple exercise was the key to building strength — and success in life.

When Mr. Aich was a teenager, his father became too sick to work, so the young man began supporting his family by performing feats of strength at local events, his son said.

Besides bending steel rods, he tore 1,000-page books in half, dragged 450-pound loads down the street and balanced himself by resting his abdomen on the tip of a sword. He had a scar on his neck where a sword had once pierced him when he slipped while performing the stunt.

In his late 20s, Mr. Aich moved to Kolkata, the commercial hub then known as Calcutta, and continued to build his strength by working out at a gym. He supported himself by selling coconuts at the city’s main railway station.

Mr. Aich entered the British colonial air force in the 1940s. Influenced by the independence movement, he joined an uprising against his superiors and was imprisoned by the British military in 1947 after slapping an officer. In jail, he exercised and trained with weights for as many as 12 hours a day.

He was released under an amnesty program a year or two later, after independence had been won. With the chiseled physique he had enhanced in jail, he won a Mr. Hercules contest in 1950, earning the moniker the Pocket Hercules.

Mr. Aich was so much smaller than India’s other famous bodybuilder, Premchand Degra, that Mr. Degra said he carried him on his shoulder at a competition in New Delhi in 1993, a moment captured in a photograph that became famous in India.

Mr. Aich participated in his first Mr. Universe contest in 1951 in London, placing second. He went on to win that contest on his second try, after a year of training in London and working for British Railways. He returned to India a national hero.

Madhukar Talwalkar, 83, a bodybuilder who is the chairman of a large fitness chain, remembered being grateful as a young man for the chance to apply oil to Mr. Aich’s body at competitions, “just for the chance to touch our country’s Mr. Universe.”

Kshitish Chatterjee, also 83, who trained at Mr. Aich’s gym and represented India in three international competitions, said Mr. Aich was a taskmaster.

“If you skipped any workout, you’d get a good kick or tappar,” he said in an interview, using the Hindi word for slap. “Nobody who worked with him ever forgets his coaching — to work with single-minded dedication and not to worry about anything.”

Mr. Aich affirmed that teaching, telling The Daily Mail: “I never allow any sort of tension to grip me. I had to struggle to earn money since my young days, but whatever the situation, I remained happy.”

Mr. Aich took up circus performing in the 1960s, traveling around India with his family. His best-loved act was known as muscle dancing, in which he rippled his body to music, Bishnu Aich said.

Chetan Pathare, the general secretary of the Indian Bodybuilders Federation, said he had never seen anyone with better muscle control than Mr. Aich. “If he wanted, he could flex only his left pectoral muscle,” he said.

That strength and muscle control stayed with Mr. Aich well into his 80s.

“He gave performances until he was 87, showing his muscles,” Mr. Talwalkar said. “He was wrinkled and bald, but he always had an eight-pack, even in old age.”

Mr. Aich never cashed in on his fame. Even after winning the Mr. Universe title, he continued to struggle financially, but he never complained about it, his friends and family said. To the end, they said, he hewed to his philosophy of “as it is.”

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 28 of the New York edition with the headline: Manohar Aich, 103, Who Won Mr. Universe Title at 4-Foot-11. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe